Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

•We review and classify the literature on workforce planning that incorporate skills.•We present a combination of technical and managerial knowledge.•The goal is to encourage the production of more realistic and useful solution techniques.

This paper presents a review and classification of the literature regarding workforce planning problems incorporating skills. In many cases, technical research regarding workforce planning focuses very hard on the mathematical model and neglects the real life implications of the simplifications that were needed for the model to perform well. On the other hand, many managerial studies give an extensive description of the human implications of certain management decisions in particular cases, but fail to provide useful mathematical models to solve workforce planning problems. This review will guide the operations researcher in his search to find useful papers and information regarding workforce planning problems incorporating skills. We not only discuss the differences and similarities between different papers, but we also give an overview of the managerial insights. The objective is to present a combination of technical and managerial knowledge to encourage the production of more realistic and useful solution techniques.